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SpaceX has published an article highlighting "more than 700 tests" of Crew Dragon's SuperDraco drop thrusters just as the company is about to close an investigation into the failure of the Dragon capsule explosion. April, mainly on equipment associated with an abortion.
According to a meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Committee (ASAP) on September 6, SpaceX has almost completed the "failure tree" of the Crew Dragon explosion, a term used to describe the process of analyzing the telemetry and to exclude all possible failure modes. Once the tree is complete, the investigation can be finalized and SpaceX can implement all the hardware and software changes needed to prevent such incidents from happening again. For now, this means that a launch in 2019 of SpaceX's first Dragon crew is certainly not planned, although the beginning of the year 2020 is still promising.
On April 20, SpaceX very quickly recognized that an anomaly had occurred during the planned fire of the C-boat-proven C201 capsule, which had been recovered a month earlier after a flawless orbital launch. Shortly after, a very low-quality video showing an attempted static fire revealed that the capsule had suffered a catastrophic explosion a few moments before the ignition of its eight SuperDraco thrusters.
Incredibly, one of the SuperDraco powerpacks (a pair of engines) of the Crew Dragon C201 was not only found intact after the explosion, but was also statically shot in the SpaceX test facility in McGregor, TX . Just under three months after the blast, SpaceX and NASA officials held a press conference in July 2019 to discuss preliminary results of their investigation into Crew Dragon's failure. Some work remained to eliminate other possibilities, but NASA and SpaceX were confident enough to conclude that an exotic interaction between the SuperDraco thruster and a leaking titanium valve had probably triggered the explosion.
According to ASAP, SpaceX and NASA again have work to do before the conclusion of the survey, describing it as "almost completed". In addition, the ASAP meeting continued to give the impression of an increasingly shortsighted focus on SpaceX's overloaded carbon (COPV) pressure vessels, which are used to store helium at high pressure. Falcon 9 and Heavy. The COPVs were one of the partial causes of the two operational failures of Falcon 9, which explains the apparent priority given by NASA to its certification.
Unspecified problems with parachutes were also raised for the two commercial crew spacecraft, continuing a trend that has been going on for years: parachutes and COPVs occupying most of ASAP's attention in meetings public. Boeing and SpaceX continue to test their parachute systems, both as part of dozens of separate tests, after about two years of concerted attempts to meet NASA's requirements.
SpaceX has already demonstrated the success of the Orbital Launch, Re-entry, Parachute Deployment and Attack at the launch of the Crew Dragon demo-1 in March 2019, as well as 18 successful Cargo Dragon parachute launches over the years. last seven years. Cargo Dragon experienced an abnormal splash in 2018, but its partially redundant chutes set nevertheless allowed for a smooth and undisturbed recovery.
Nevertheless, it seems that SpaceX and Boeing will have to continue to perform parachute tests for an indefinite time. The next stage of Boeing – an unprepared orbital test flight comparable to SpaceX's Demo-1 mission – is expected to be launched no earlier than Oct. 28, according to sources from the Russian space industry. The next important step for SpaceX as the crew Dragon will be the flight abandonment test (IFA) of the spacecraft, scheduled for no earlier than November 2019.
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